There is a geographic information system (GIS) as a technique for enabling advanced analysis and expeditious judgment through comprehensive management and processing of geographical space data (land map data) having information as to positions and spaces while offering visual displayability thereof.
GIS is adaptable for use as systems including, but not limited to, area marketing, global disaster-prevention information systems, and scenery simulation systems, by letting several kinds of data be linked to map data, wherein examples of the former are vegetation data, weather data, land coverage data, disaster prevention data, regional development data, demographic data, agricultural statistics data, land use data, road/river ledger data and others.
Regarding a method for managing target subjects within a geographical space, this is disclosed, for example, in Patent Document 1. The invention as taught thereby is such that when inputting conditions of a user-desired fixed property to a user terminal device, access is provided via the Internet to a landed estate information database and a geographic information database, for causing search results such as a distribution of per-area fixed properties to be displayed on a land map and for permitting, upon selection of a desired area, landed estates to be displayed on such area's land map in the form of marks. Furthermore, when selecting a single landed estate on the map, its detailed information is displayed along with a surrounding area map thereof. Upon discovery of a preferred landed estate, the user operates the user terminal device to give access to a real estate broker terminal device for establishment of a provisional contract. The invention is aimed at provision of an information providing method, apparatus and system capable of readily searching any desired real estate in landed estate search-up events.
Further, as for communications while taking account of the position of a target person, a technique therefor is disclosed in JP-A-2000-004484. The invention is such that a message sender sends his or her message to unspecified users who match conditions, by merely specifying the conditions as to a space without specifying message recipients. The invention permits the message sender to merely specify conditions as to the space (or space and time) without specifying message recipients to thereby send a message to unspecified users matching the conditions whereby a user who is walking on a street can receive messages being best suited to such location (or the location and its time) so that spatially (or spatially and timely) optimized user-to-user communications are establishable.